Broadband networks are continuing to grow in common areas, such as, the workplace and the home. Femtocells are being used at the enterprise level with the goal of extending wide area data coverage to the office. The femtocell has been considered a potential candidate to replace the enterprise wireless LAN entirely.
In the GSM-UMTS world, operators and vendors are exploring uses for unlicensed mobile access (UMA), which currently provides services to residential dual-mode Wi-Fi deployments, for tunneling voice traffic from an enterprise femto-network to the core network. Other options may include implementing the SIP protocol used in VoIP networks to be part of the wireless networks as well. Optimally, a SIP-based femto-network may provide a wide variety of services to the end users. However, at a minimum, network integration efforts would require convergence servers to connect legacy voice networks to the SIP-based architecture at the enterprise level.
In addition to using the femtocell to expand the public wireless network inside the limited constraints of the enterprise, the private enterprise network would likely be linked to public networks as well. Enterprise networks could deploy data femtocells alongside of voice femtocells. The data femtocell configuration would create a private network through the enterprise's own data connection(s). In such a case, the network operator would not be concerned with broadband capacity being removed from the macro-network. Load-balancing may be incorporated into femtocell architecture to increase efficiency and user access to the network.